Memo: The DoorDash OS

DoorDash has an opportunity to power an evolved, local commerce economy where urbanization has taken a back seat to remote work, the homestead is more relevant than ever before, and the “arming of the rebels” has yet to capture the imagination of Main Street businesses. This is bigger than late night takeout: Food delivery is to DoorDash what book sales were to Amazon.

A singular failure has shaped my understanding of commerce and how digital would influence physical retail. In 2014, eCommerce accounted for just 7.7% of US retail sales, the investment into urbanization had a positive trajectory, and apps like Postmates and DoorDash had begun to eat market share of incumbents like Grubhub. With that backdrop, a close friend and I pieced together a mobile application with a simple marketplace function. It featured an open chat room to guide users through recommendations, sales, and checkout.

The experiment had one goal: To understand if eCommerce could improve the viability of local, analog retail businesses. To do so, we targeted hard goods (not food products). We built atop Uber’s then-available pricing API and enabled independent retailers to market their products within our app and ship products as far as 20 miles outside of the city. Uber’s drivers delivered the goods to their homes.

To accomplish this, we indexed the goods of independent retailers and tracked inventory with a relatively light integration that relied on imported Quickbooks data. And then each product’s corresponding image was pulled into the app through .JSON web calls. Given that the vast majority of featured stores were within a mile of us, contractors were tasked with acquiring the goods and bringing them to a central location to stage for delivery by Uber. The last shipment left by the close of business and inventory was painstakingly updated upon the completion of each business day. In just under a year, the app sold $627,000 in top line sales at an average margin of around 17%.

That’s where the positives ended. The price of doing business with Uber was costly and the fleet of drivers was subpar, causing a number of customer service issues. The demand for hard goods was outpaced by the demand for perishable goods (food). And the area’s physical retail scene was a draw, so most consumers opted to walk, drive, or bike over instead. The app eventually amounted to an expensive experiment in between jobs.

The Difference: Now and Then

The experiment wasn’t a complete failure, however. By the time that we shut the application down, we’d developed a better understanding of the intersections between real estate, retail, technology, and the limitations of small businesses. I also learned an important lesson about eCommerce adoption: 2014 was far too early. Today, the former 7.7% share of retail (in 2014) sales has tripled. Nearly one of every four dollars is spent online in 2020.

Given that our focus was on non-coastal markets and second-tier cities, the marketplace helped us understand the needs of retailers outside of the country’s main retail hubs: Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and so on. The app experience was nowhere near perfect, but the experiment was valuable. I went on to build DTC brands, founding 2PM Inc just a year later. That friend of mine became the founder of Loop Returns.

Fast forward and many of the retailers who once considered eCommerce a distraction have now invested heavily into building online retail as a primary channel. Consider Josh Quinn of Ohio’s Tiger Tree, a multi-million dollar independent retailer and former partner of our app experiment. Quinn recently shuttered Tiger Tree’s doors to pursue an eCommerce-first strategy. He said:

It’s an interesting example of just how fast retail has accelerated in six years. To say I don’t think my customers would have seen the utility in an on-demand delivery solution seems laughable now. But we could have been better positioned. We did so well as brick-and-mortar stores that it kept us from investing the way we should have. It hurts to think of where we’d be if we would have put the time into eCommerce back then.

Quinn is representative of a large swath of retailers who relied upon a brick-and-mortar business before the pandemic. But he won’t make the mistake again. He added: “We are in the middle of local online retail being a thing. Almost half of our eCommerce orders go to the Columbus, Ohio area.”

This is the new economy that DoorDash is primed to capture. The permanence of remote work culture and the restrictions placed on urban dining and nightlife has spawned three separate trends. There is a shift from major cities to smaller ones, urban flight to suburban “cities”, and housing to the all-encompassing homestead.

Sanitized urbanization removes the perceived risks of living in urban areas while adding the value of – what’s often – upgraded infrastructure, improved schools, and lower tax bases. [2PM, 1]

As remote work and distance learning continues to become more commonplace, entertainment, commerce, and utility will shift from physical to digital as well. There has been an extraordinary shift from thinking along the lines of office perks to thinking about optimizing the home. Consider Wayfair’s sudden shift of fortune. In 2017, the furniture reseller traded at a $5 billion market cap. Today it trades at nearly $26 billion, a growth emblematic of a boom in redesigning the home for modern needs: remote work, leisure, and comfort.

If this is any indication of how small business owners will react to these macroeconomic changes, we can expect second and third-order effects in the housing market to continue to materialize.

Inside The Home

Like Postmates, which has long tested hard goods marketplace capabilities, DoorDash’s opportunity lies with supporting the businesses of independent retailers by providing new opportunity for them. Not just by delivering the goods but by fostering a marketplace that expands their reach to wider, local audiences. By streamlining retailers as sources of goods and developing new initiatives to reach customers, their marketplace partners will be more inclined to view DoorDash as an effective customer acquisition engine.

A possible future as DoorDash embraces the shift to the homestead (and innovative demand-gen partnerships).

Success or failure will depend on growth beyond food delivery as the core model. This means that the development of efficient customer acquisition, fair and incentivized pay for its last-mile workforce, and paths to hyper growth in gross merchandising volume are key to the company’s long term viability. Consider this excerpt from a recent analysis on DoorDash:

That inability to change the business model is also likely to keep DoorDash from making any meaningful profit. Grubhub, the only US food delivery service on the stock market, recently complained that food delivery is not enough to build a sustainable and profitable business. [2]

By instituting a local marketplace model, DoorDash would encourage retailers like Quinn who find value in reaching more customers in their cities without relying upon the postal service for delivery. Quinn cited his frustration with existing local shipping models:

Independent retailers like us are facing something of a crisis with USPS shipments being delayed. Not that I am blaming them – I understand the strains on their system.

Amazon Prime has popularized next day and same day delivery. Services like HBO Max have begun to shift resources away from physical theaters and towards home-streaming models. And founded a year before our local commerce experiment, DoorDash is now trading at $55.6 billion. Like Jeff Bezos former marketplace of books, Tony Xu’s marketplace of local retailers is in its infancy. While intended for restaurants, the technology could easily be applied to retailers. And while DoorDash touts partnerships with large and sophisticated companies (Macy’s, etc), the delivery app’s real opportunity lies with locally-owned retailers who’d rely on DoorDash for the technical expertise and the audience to grow their businesses – a model that not even Shopify could compete with right now.

In its short existence, DoorDash has evolved well beyond just  delivery logistics, adding services like Storefront, which enables merchants to set up digital ordering directly from their native channels. [3]

We look at apps like DoorDash and see food delivery. Rather, view them as the last-mile enabler for businesses who are leaning into localized eCommerce. Food delivery, alone, will not justify the $50+ billion market cap but a city-by-city network of local retailers may. This is the eCommerce era now. Like every other retailer, DoorDash must learn to create new demand and service it with creative solutions. I suspect that the company’s reach will soon extend beyond your kitchen or your mobile phones. In the near future, the app may function more like a retail operating system.

By Web Smith | Editor: Hilary Milnes | Art: Alex Remy | About 2PM

Memo: The Smartest In The Room

Apophenia is a word that I’ve long considered to be one of the most important in the English language. Both a normal phenomenon and an abnormal phenomenon depending on one’s mental acuity, its connotation is complex. It’s the ability to find meaningful connections between unrelated ideas. Ideas and community are the fuel of this phenomenon.

Apophenia’s role in history is understated. The Age of Enlightenment propelled mankind forward in remarkable ways. At the core of that time period was the invention of the European coffee house. Caffeinated by imported goods and free of the dulls of Renaissance-era alcohols, academic and social ideas took shape in rooms dominated by men who spoke powerfully and dutifully as if it were their singular contribution to society.

The European coffee house, or the “penny university”, democratized information synthesis in ways once exclusive to universities. It promoted conversation, debate, and authorship among active participants and nosy listeners alike. Ideas were valuable. Imagine a ship with a minor leak near the bow. Only a fortified wooden board can provide the stability that the ship needs to endure the tests and rigors of sea. Like hardened planks of sea-worthy wood, Enlightenment-era ideas plugged the hulls of ships constructed by others. One person’s idea completed another’s. It was rarely the smartest person in the room who received the ultimate credit for the end creation. But if you were in that coffee house long enough, you’d likely leave with a creation of your own.

In theory, digital forums are this era’s coffee houses. Revelations once found in the “penny universities” of 18th Century London are digital communities of shared knowledge today. In Nick deWilde’s The Social Architecture of Impactful Communities, he explains:

Individuals typically “hire” communities to accomplish transitions that require human connection. A startup founder who wants to become a better leader applies to Leaders in Tech to get the type of honest feedback needed for professional growth.

This is partly why ideas are valuable: they can serve the function of community. Ideas can solidify into a hardened mass, capable of keeping another ship afloat. Yet, there are endless essays written anchored by the idea that “ideas don’t matter.” These wise writers will go on to explain that if you cannot execute on those ideas, your words or thoughts lack value. These authors espouse the value of execution. Make no mistake, hustle culture rode the same wave. So, I beg to differ.

Consider the late American paleontologist, biologist, and historian of science Stephen Gould:

My talent is making connections. That’s why I’m an essayist. It’s also why my technical work is structured the way it is. How do the parts of the snail shell interact? What are the rates of growth? Can you see a pattern? I’m always trying to see a pattern in this forest and I’m tickled that I can do that. … I can sit down on just about any subject and think of about 20 things that relate to it and they’re not hokey connections.

It took Gould years to realize that this was a skill. Sometimes, the smartest people in the room are ones who think through societal problems, industry shortcomings, or game-changing innovations. These ideas make their way to mainstream news outlets, sizable Twitter feeds, or to industry mavens who repeat soundbites with little need to cite where they’d heard it. And because of these ideas, news outlets earn more clicks, Twitter followings grow, and industry mavens collect compensation for their appearances. So why is it that some ideators need to execute to prove their worth, while others earn perceived value merely because they’ve found an audience?

The ability to harness ideas and turn them into inventions, infrastructure, products, or art is a rare skill that should be valued. This is certain. But the opportunity to do so is not always evenly distributed. Many of the best thinkers are builders in their own rights but for a myriad of reasons, their ideas aren’t always attributed to them.

The communication medium of the era plays a sizable role in how ideas are attributed.

The most notable Greeks were orators. Leaders of the American colonial era wrote voluminous treatises and letters. Alexander Hamilton, one of the most prolific creators in history, wrote 85 articles and essays between 1788 and 1789. The early 1900s saw the rise of radio. Franklin D. Roosevelt transcended the power of addresses made by most of the prior presidents by using the radio to instruct and inspire Americans. In the 1960s the television took center stage. A handsome John F. Kennedy ruled a televised debate while Richard Nixon was the winner to most who were tuned into the radio transmission.

The internet pioneered a new type of thought leader in the early 2000s. Today, we are in the midst of the rise of text-based media, whether by way of Twitter or newsletter. The same methods that once thrived in the coffee houses of Europe live on on platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Substack, Slack, and private forums.

In the spirit of highlighting the smartest in the room, here are a number of business leaders, executives, and consultants within the 2PM ecosystem that have the ideas that move industries forward.

When Naj Austin made the bet on Ethel’s Club in 2018, she should have been able to easily raise money based on the idea that the marginalized deserved a community-minded place to congregate. That same year, The Wing raised $117 million to expand its services to its core demographic, while Austin was essentially scraping by to build on her collection of ideas.

What most impressed me about Austin was her ability to pivot to digital services for the Ethel’s Club community as the pandemic began to disrupt physical retail businesses like hers and The Wing in early 2020. Austin’s agility paid dividends and she is now currently raising for her next venture, Somewhere Good.

You can follow Naj’s ideas on Twitter.

Before Brittany Chavez had a sustainable eCommerce platform to build her marketplace on, she’d already taken her idea of a resource for her community “Shop Latinx” and built an audience around it with her Co-Founder Miles Montes. Their Instagram account has reached over 60,000 fans and customers of what the media calls “Etsy for Latinos.” Halie LeSavage of Morning Brew explained why her Techstars-backed venture could work:

As 2020 keeps reminding us, Gen Z and millennials are adamant about shopping their values. And Latinx shoppers are a powerful consumer group: They’ll drive $1.9+ trillion of U.S. spending by 2023, per Nielsen. [2]

If there is one thing that I have learned about Chavez, it’s that: she’s resilient, she doesn’t stop until her ideas take shape, she welcomes the ideas of others, and she gives the credit where its due. Her collective of 60,000+ consumers and fans will agree.

You can follow Brittany’s ideas on Twitter (and here until Twitter fixes her original account).

I first met Sherrell at the National Association of Black Journalists in Miami, Florida in 2018. Seated with Trapital’s Dan Runcie, we each explained our ideas and what we hoped for our independent media companies to a small room of attendees. At the time, her latest venture The Plug was in its infancy. Today, it is one of the most depended upon industry resources in technology. Consider this report by the Seattle Times from August 2020.

She didn’t see her newsletter becoming a media business unto itself, but The Plug — which takes its name from a colloquial term for someone who knows everyone and “has the hookup on everything,” Dorsey says — took off.

She earned a master’s degree in data journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, focusing on how data can help “tell better stories about underrepresented groups in technology,” Dorsey says, explaining her thesis. [3]

Sherrell is building one of the most pivotal companies in human resources. And though every technology firm now wants to hire her away from her idea-turned-creation, I suspect she will have more impact independently.

You can follow Sherrell’s ideas on Twitter.

Credited with launching the profitable content division at the famed Derris PR agency, Grace Garcia Clarke is one of the most curious and free thinkers in the space where agency and media intersects. Our first interaction was a December 2019 debate within Paul Munford’s Lean Luxe community on the merits of the botched Peloton advertisement and what it would mean for the company’s fortunes.

Formerly an operative at Derris, she’s now independent and highly coveted. Brands tap her for communications, industry research, and her eye for understanding what stodgy businessmen do not. An example of this is her well-researched product rundown for New York Magazine’s The Strategist where she wrangled the opinions of dozens of Generation Z TikTok users to publish one of the publication’s best converting articles.

No products sell faster on TikTok than beauty products, whether it’s a DIY eyebrow lamination kit, men’s shaving powder, or a shower jelly that costs exactly $1. And because the app is dominated by teens, many of these things are easy on the wallet (or the allowance, as it were). To find out what lives up to the hype, we spent hours exchanging hundreds of DMs with TikTok influencers. [4]

When given the autonomy to make decisions for companies that she partners with, they benefit. I should know; she is a frequent collaborator at 2PM.

You can follow Grace’s ideas on Twitter.

Andrea Hernández is a consumer packaged goods oracle. Her work with Snaxshot is the fruits of an idea that she’s long held: an editorialization of the data behind food and CPG trends. A native of San Pedro Sula, Cortés, Honduras, I have watched her audience around Snaxshot begin to transcend its niche. Hernández is also the founder of Mood Food Snacks, so she has a keen insight into the larger market. A recent report by Morning Brew featured her ideas around CPG and distribution through the pandemic and beyond:

We will see the rise of “dark stores” like Amazon, which recently launched their first online only Whole Foods in Brooklyn that will only focus on fulfilling grocery orders made online, and DoorDash, which launched DashMart. [5]

When she writes about CPG, I listen. Her ideas have been incredibly valuable and Snaxshot will grow because of them.

You can follow Andrea’s ideas on Twitter.

This list could go on. The idea of ideas is misunderstood. Whereas the largest audiences of the early-internet era were the victors with the spoils, the newsletter era is surfacing new ideas at the core. The convention of pattern matching is slowly giving way to the merit of the thinker.

Of course, great and monetizable ideas are still filtered and featured by mainstream sources. CNBC, Vogue and the LA Times will continue to get the credit for the work of smaller audiences. But if there’s one thing that I’ve noticed, it’s that this era has begun to shorten the distance between the originators of keen thoughts and the grand audiences that want to hear them.

In this way, ideas have never been more valuable, because it’s no longer thought to be binary – it never was. There aren’t ideators and executors. Rather, ideas exist along a spectrum where novel thoughts can lead to opportunity. These intangible assets are a currency, now more than ever. And it’s time that we begin to recognize the smartest in the room while they’re still inching along. They won’t be for long.

By Web Smith | Editor: Hilary Milnes | Art: Alex Remy | About 2PM

 

Memo: The Aspiration of Health

As New York goes, so does the rest of retail. Across the wealthiest neighborhoods in New York City, new retailers are opening the doors to those who can afford it. Well-appointed and with an aura of exclusivity, these storefronts are not designed for the democratization of goods but rather something to the opposite effect. Doom scroll through Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat or any other social platform and you may see signs that the pandemic doesn’t affect everyone quite the same. You have faithfully executed the solo quarantine for nearly nine months. Meanwhile, there are dinner parties and other high-profile gatherings going on around you. In October, Kim Kardashian shared news of her successful vacation with nearly 40 friends and members of her family.

After two weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time. [1]

While you were alone and eating bodega cake, the modern-day Marie Antoinette was swimming near whales and watching movies on the beach. Wealth is an expression most commonly viewed through the lens of possessions. But in a pandemic year, the foremost expression of wealth is simply a normal life. In Gilded Age 2.0, I explained:

This era has begun to reveal sharp contrasts in how Americans approach the consumption of goods and services. Net consumption continues to grow despite a catastrophic number of store closures. Some in retail and media are quietly recognizing that the most competitive approach to growth is the pursuit of the modern luxury consumer – a cohort that seems to be invulnerable to these shifts. Products have become more exclusive, with higher quality production, and superior service. [2PM, 2]

The modern aspirational economy is changing. Doctor of Sociology Ana Andjelic’s recently published “The Business of Aspiration” explains the phenomenon that we are witnessing today:

Modern aspiration economy is anchored not in accumulation and display of possessions or even experiences, but of social capital, environmental credits, and cultural savviness. […] The modern capital is also rooted in FOMO (fear of missing out). […] There’s status in membership in a community, or in the ability to attract and command attention on social media by accumulating likes and followers. [3]

The retailers that are popping up in the wealthy neighborhoods of New York City don’t sell shoes, purses or even designer face masks. Just blocks away from long lines at the CityMD, these retailers sell the exclusivity of healthcare with no wait. Found in prestigious locales like Montauk’s Surf Lodge, accessible and expedient rapid testing is the most luxurious product available to consumers today. In August, the New York Times wrote:

One of the easier places to get a rapid coronavirus test is the Surf Lodge, a hotel and restaurant in Montauk, N.Y., known for hosting and entertaining celebrities including John Legend and Bon Jovi. [4]

As on November, you don’t even have to travel to Montauk. You can walk to a store in Soho, New York and pay $450 to sit in relative luxury while you await your fate. It takes no longer than 15 minutes.

Behold, Rapid Test NYC. A swankier alternative to City MD, the shiny spot offers three different tests with results in as little as 15 minutes, along with, fittingly enough for this crowd, “frequent flyer” packages with discounts, in case you have to get tested often for work, school, travel, or let’s be real, play. Using the most accurate rapid test machine on the market (over 95% accuracy) they are certainly striving to make safety a priority while providing, according to their reviews, literal five-star service. [5]

The latest aspirational category to rise is one birthed by bifurcation and pandemic. The luxury commercialization of rapid tests achieves Andjelic’s definition of new aspiration while being built on one of the old: the exclusivity of retail real estate in luxury developments. The consumer is not just buying the $450 test, they are buying the right to live normally, even if just for one social event. The rapid test is the one consumer good that enables some semblance of freedom in today’s market. To be seen or heard in social settings without the insulting gaze of others requires this 95% accurate test.

This pivot to health as an aspirational product will have wider implications, as luxury goods tend to go. As more retailers understand the demand curve of this offering, more will offer it within their existing storefronts. The investment into this offering has a six to 12 month window of opportunity before we begin to return to the old normal. Imagine the rapid test pop-up within Saks Fifth Avenue stores or as a stand alone area in America’s finest malls beyond the borders of the progressive retail capital. It wouldn’t be surprising to see early vaccinations distributed in similar manners. There are applications of this in operation today. New-age health technology companies like Levels interface with medical physicians to provide direct-to-consumer products that were once prescription-only.

This retail trend has a short shelf life. When rapid tests are made more widely available, the luxury appeal of them will vanish. But their demand will presumably be replaced by demand for early-stage administrations of a vaccine without the lines of CityMD. That luxury has a longer window. But as Andjelic has pointed out, aspiration is more social and savvy than before. We live for the documentation of our experiences. And as COVID cases rise, so will the new Veblen good that has risen with it: a social life.

The aspirational retail health experience is one that the top .01% have long known. Today, the top 1% are carrying it like a Birkin bag. The edge of awareness is the first stage of aspiration. It will diffuse, from the streets of Soho to the upscale retail developments of Nashville, Columbus, and Charlotte.

By Web Smith | Art: Alex Remy | Editor: Hilary Milnes | About 2PM